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Violence at Myanmar Border Puts Beijing in a Bindhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/violence-at-myanmar-border-puts-beijing-in-a-bind/
Mon, 23 Mar 2015 03:46:46 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=182252Last week, The Economist reported on conflict between government troops and local rebels in Myanmar’s border region of Kokang—an area largely populated by Chinese-speaking ethnic Han—and how the fighting, now six weeks running, poses a problem for Beijing:

The conflict involves China partly because the fighting is on its doorstep: on March 8th stray bombs damaged a house on the Chinese side. Kokang also retains a special place in China’s psyche. It was part of the country until the Qing dynasty ceded it to Britain in 1897. Around 90% of the Kokang are ethnic Han-Chinese (a similar proportion make up China’s own population); they speak Mandarin, use Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, and many have friends and relatives in Yunnan. Some have Chinese identity cards.

[…] For the government in Beijing the local conflict is bothersome: China’s leaders care more about domestic stability and regional economic ties than border tribes. Official policy towards Myanmar, as elsewhere, is not to intervene. Myanmar’s military junta relied on China when the West imposed sanctions in the 1990s, which led to a backlash against the country in 2011 after Thein Sein came to power. Some contracts have since been renegotiated and Chinese investment has recovered. China now sees Myanmar mainly as a trading partner and energy supplier.

[…] The conflict also sheds light on the different priorities of Beijing and Yunnan. Although trade with Myanmar accounts for less than 1% of China’s total, it makes up 24% of Yunnan’s. Residents on both sides benefit from being allowed to move freely, but fighting jeopardises that. So local Yunnanese ought to have a strong incentive to end the fighting. […] [Source]

Beijing’s quandary lies in trying to balance its commitment to protecting Chinese lives around the world with its aim to avoid exacerbating an already rocky relationship with Myanmar.

“On the national level, China’s bottom-line interests are border security and its broader aspirations in Myanmar, but Beijing will not sacrifice either one for the other,” said Yun Sun, an expert on the region at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.

[…] A complicating factor for Beijing is that Kokang is mainly populated by ethnic Chinese who have migrated across the border over centuries. Today, the Kokangese maintain strong ties of commerce and kinship with residents in Yunnan. Tens of thousands, in the estimates of some aid groups, have flooded across the border, with many now living in camps set up by Chinese authorities.

Many Burmese see Kokangese as foreigners and Chinese invaders, and social media has been rife with messages of support for Myanmar troops, known as the Tatmadaw. The Myanmar government has capitalized on this show of anti-Chinese sentiment, drumming up nationalistic support by accusing Chinese citizens of aiding the rebels.

China has rebuffed accusations from Myanmar that Chinese citizens are sheltering and offering supplies to the Kokang rebels. […] [Source]

As violence upends the social order in swaths of Xinjiang, where resistance to Beijing’s rule has been growing among ethnic Uighurs, officials there and elsewhere in China are pushing new measures — like chartering entire trains — to bring Uighurs and members of other ethnic minorities to parts of the country where the Han, the nation’s ruling ethnicity, are the majority.

Strengthening the labor export program is a major component of a push by the central government to try to assimilate Uighurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people, into mainstream Han culture. But such programs have themselves contributed to past ethnic hostilities, including an explosive episode in 2009.

The policy comes from the top. At a two-day work forum on Xinjiang in May, President Xi Jinping expressed support for sending more Uighurs to work and be educated in Han areas “to enhance mutual understanding among different ethnic groups and boost ties between them,” according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. [Source]

As the Communist Party draws up new policy measures to quell ethnic tension in Xinjiang, Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has offered to help Xi fight Uyghur extremists in the northwest. At The New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg looks at how the ongoing ethnic unrest in Xinjiang has created an opportunity for Afghanistan to develop closer ties with China.

A major factor in China’s stepped-up involvement with Afghanistan is a growing alarm in Beijing over Islamist militancy among Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic group from northwestern China, analysts say.

Since 2001, a smattering of Uighur militants have fought in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And Chinese officials blame a Uighur separatist group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, for a spate of attacks that have killed hundreds of people in China over the past two years.

Some experts say Chinese fears that the Uighur separatist cause might spread widely among other militant groups are overblown. But where some see unfounded fears, the Afghans have sensed an opportunity to secure a new, rich benefactor.

[…] In the past year, Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, has persistently flagged to Beijing each and every one of the dozens of Uighurs who it says were caught by Afghan forces fighting inside the country. And Afghan and Western officials familiar with the effort say that the intelligence agency has painstakingly prepared dossiers for Chinese officials, laying out evidence tracing the militants back to Islamist training camps inside Pakistan. [Source]

Like Tibet much of the ethnic violence in recent years has been a result both of Beijing’s continuing hard-line approach towards ‘splitist’ tendencies and Uyghur opposition to the officially sanctioned, and indeed supported, migration of Han Chinese into the region. The latter is the result of the ‘Go West’, or ‘Chinese Western Development’ program that was launched by then-Premier Zhu Rhongji in 2000 in order to alleviate the growing economic division between the eastern maritime board and the rest of the country …. Massive infrastructure projects including highways and rail lines were largely designed according to Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights to “bind Xinjiang more closely to the rest of the PRC.” While the Chinese government denies that its policies are designed to promote demographic change the proportion of Xinjiang’s population that is Han Chinese has risen from approximately 5 per cent in the 1940s to around 40 per cent today.

… For the Uyghurs the continued inflow of ethnic Han Chinese threatens their distinct ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity and threatens to make them eventually a minority in the region as a whole.

Units of the People’s Armed Police, some in riot suppression gear, stood in clumps at points throughout Kashgar, a Silk Road city of 600,000 people, about 80 percent of whom are members of Xinjiang’s native Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group.

Armored cars were parked along streets and a nighttime curfew was in force downtown, with people only allowed to cross the security cordon to leave for the suburbs ….

Pools of dried blood were visible Tuesday on the floor of the destroyed restaurant, its windows were shattered and its walls charred by fire.

]]>123002World’s Most Typical Person: Han Chinese Manhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/03/world%e2%80%99s-most-typical-person-han-chinese-man/
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 22:20:57 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=118593National Geographic’s new series, “Seven Billion”, attempts to analyze the world’s population of seven billion people. According to it, the most typical person in the world is a Han-Chinese male. From Wall Street Journal blog:

Nat Geo went on a search for the most typical human face. After crunching the numbers, they discovered their candidate: a 28-year-old Han Chinese male.

According to the magazine, there are nine million people in the world who fit that description.

Not surprisingly, China scores the top spot for both nationality (19% of people are Chinese) and language (13% of people speak Mandarin as their first language).

When communist China was formed in 1949, Mao Tse-tung decreed that everybody should follow a single time zone, no matter that the country is as wide as the continental United States.

But Uighurs, the dominant minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, balked at running their lives on Beijing time, which would have them getting up in the pitch dark and going to sleep at sunset.

[…]

So the Uighurs follow their own unofficial time, which is two hours earlier — in effect following the dictates of the sun rather than of Beijing, about 2,000 miles away.

The separate time zones are in fact a metaphor for the chasm between the Uighurs and Han Chinese living in uneasy proximity in Xinjiang. Since 1949, the ethnic Chinese have grown from 9% to more than 40% of the province’s population, and Uighurs accuse the Chinese government of suppressing their culture and faith. The Uighurs are a Muslim people who look more European than Chinese and use a Turkic language sprinkled with Arabic.

]]>36562In Tibetan Areas, Parallel Worlds Now Collidehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/03/in-tibetan-areas-parallel-worlds-now-collide/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/03/in-tibetan-areas-parallel-worlds-now-collide/#commentsWed, 19 Mar 2008 22:45:31 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/03/in-tibetan-areas-parallel-worlds-now-collide/Howard French for the New York Times reports on the economic disparity and ethnic tensions that exist in many of China’s mixed communities.

In Tibet and in neighboring provinces, like Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, where Tibetans and other ethnic minorities live in large numbers, Tibetans and Han live in closer proximity than ever before, but they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.

To be sure, there is no legalized ethnic discrimination, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

Non-Han minorities may comprise only 9 percent of China’s population, but as the violence in Tibet and simmering resentment in Xinjiang indicate, the problem is one that Beijing is unable to resolve.This is a blow to President Hu Jintao, who is supposed to be an expert on Tibet, where he was once party secretary. He ordered troops as well as police forces into Tibet and Xinjiang last year to guard against pre-Olympic disturbances, but to no avail.

There are three reasons for the Communist leadership’s inability to address the issue other than by repression. First, given that Beijing’s first priority is government centralization, the official designation of any “autonomous region” in China is a façade.

Second, there is the innate belief in the superiority of the Han race, a notion historically reflected in China’s attitudes to all its neighbors as well as toward the non-Han minorities within its borders.

Third, the three regions with significant minority populations that are actual or potential trouble spots are all frontier areas that Beijing regards as strategically important. The minorities in southwest China are no problem because they are small, isolated and near frontiers from which China has never been invaded. The homelands of former invaders – the Mongols and Manchus – still exist, but they are now overwhelmingly Han. But Tibet – with its long history of isolation, immense cultural, linguistic and religious differences and on-and-off independence – is a different matter.

Dexter Roberts, in Business Week, argues that the failed development of western China by Beijing has fanned “ethnic resentment aimed at the millions of Han Chinese who have migrated into the region and have taken skilled, higher-paying jobs building the new roads, airports, and power stations.”

For China’s laggard west and its large ethnic minority populations, things looked a lot more optimistic back in 2000. That was when the government launched its grandly named “Develop the West” program. The aim was to use Beijing’s policy and financial support to reverse decades of economic stagnation, boost local provincial economies in part by tapping their rich resources, and ultimately narrow the yawning income gap between the flourishing coastal region of China and its poor western hinterlands. And as an added bonus, the new wealth would help ease ethnic tensions that have for centuries inflamed the loosely controlled western reaches of China (BusinessWeek.com, 12/20/06).

There is no denying that Beijing has tried. Over the past five years alone, the central government has spent more than $40 billion on infrastructure and social programs in the 12 western provinces. Last year fixed-asset investment into western China grew to $397 billion, up 28%, faster than China’s national average of 25%. “Continued progress was made in the large-scale development of the western region,” said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Mar. 5 in his annual address to the National People’s Congress.

However, many of the economic statistics just don’t support that optimistic appraisal. Take overall gross domestic product growth for China’s west. While it grew an impressive 14.5% last year, several percentage points higher than the national average, the region’s total economy still only amounted to $667 billion. That’s less than one-fifth of China’s total GDP. Tibet’s GDP, up 17.5%, was a paltry $4.56 billion, dead last as the smallest economy of any region across China. All together, nine of the western provinces are among China’s 10 smallest provincial economies. “The western development plan is a strategy without effective policies,” says Zhang Baotong, director of the regional development consultancy center at the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences in the western city of Xian.